Television service providers comprise businesses that provide television programs via cable, satellite, or other infrastructure and/or methods to customers who contract, or subscribe, for the receipt of such television programs. Hence, the customers are often referred to as subscribers. The television service providers generally have their own cable-based, satellite-based, and/or other infrastructures that are used to communicate the television programs to their subscribers. The television programs are, typically, received by the television service providers from a television network (including, but not limited to, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), CBS Broadcasting, Inc. (CBS), Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS), and the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN)) or other source and are re-broadcast via the providers' infrastructures to interface devices located at the subscribers' premises. The interface devices receive the television programs and communicate electrical signals representative of the television programs to connected display devices, such as television sets, thereby enabling viewing of the television programs by the subscribers.
The television service providers provide many services and features to subscribers in addition to basic television programming in order to enhance the usability of the basic television programming services. For example, many cable television service providers provide channel guide, pop up program reminders, and digital video recording services and/or features. The channel guides, as seen in FIG. 1, supply subscribers with the channel numbers, channel names, program names, and starting times for television programs that are available for viewing currently or later in the day. The pop up program reminders enable subscribers to select television programs for viewing in the future and to configure the interface devices at their premises to cause messages for the selected programs to pop up and be displayed on the subscribers' television sets at or near the selected programs' respective starting times. Through generation and display of the pop up messages at the bottom of subscribers' television screens as seen in FIG. 2, the subscribers may watch a television program on one channel and then be reminded that another television program on a different channel is about to begin. The digital video recording services are often provided via digital video recorders (DVRs) incorporated into the interface devices at subscribers' premises and enable subscribers to configure the interface devices to cause the recording of selected television programs during digital video recording sessions beginning and ending at their respectively scheduled start and end times. The subscribers may subsequently cause the interface devices to playback the recorded television programs for viewing on television sets connected to the interface devices.
The channel guides, pop up program reminders, and digital video recording features are each based on the starting times for television programs published by the television service providers. Unfortunately, when a television program is preceded by another television program comprising television coverage of a live event (such as, for example, a sporting event, a parade, or a politician's speech) received from a television network and re-broadcast by the television service provider on a channel associated with the television network, the starting time for the subsequent program may be later than originally anticipated and published due to the preceding program running longer than expected. As a consequence, the starting times for all subsequent programs displayed in the channel guide for the channel are often wrong. Additionally, if a subscriber has previously set up a pop up program reminder for a subsequent program on the channel, then the corresponding pop up reminder message will be generated at the wrong time. Similarly, if a subscriber has previously set up a digital video recording session to start at a subsequent program's originally published starting time, then the digital video recording session will start at the wrong time.
Therefore, there exists a need in the industry for apparatuses and methods that enable a television network or source of a television program corresponding to a live event to inform downstream television service providers that the live event is running longer than originally anticipated, to inform downstream television service providers when the television program corresponding to the live event has ended, and to automatically cause cable channel guides, pop up program reminders, and digital video recording sessions to be adjusted, re-configured, or re-programmed accordingly.